PARK Magazine

“I LOVE MANNERS
AND I LOVE DISCIPLINE
AND TRADITION.”
Truman Capote
While attending the exclusive boarding school Foxcroft, in
Virginia, Guest wrote letters to Truman Capote complaining
about the place, which she detested. So, Capote tried phoning
her repeatedly, and the dorm mother, an English teacher,
thought it was a prank.
This happened four days in a row and, unaware of the calls,
Guest was hauled into the principal’s office and told that her
friend was pranking the dorm mother every night, calling and
saying it’s Truman Capote. I said, “It probably is Truman
Capote.” The teacher accused her of lying and grounded her
for the upcoming weekend when Guest’s mother was coming
to visit. “I said, ‘Mom, I can’t leave.’ She said, ‘What do you
mean you can’t leave?’ And I said, ‘Well, I think Truman’s been
trying to get me and they think I’m lying.’”
Her mother barreled into the head mistress’s office, demanding,
“How dare you accuse my daughter of lying?” She told
them that she’d spoken to Capote, and he was, in fact, trying
to get in touch. C.Z added, “Cornelia informs me that the dorm
mother is an English teacher, and if this woman is stupid
enough to not know Truman Capote and his voice, she shouldn’t
be here. I’m taking my daughter out of your school.”
Diana Vreeland
C.Z. was holding her newborn daughter in her arms, and
when Diana Vreeland approached to see the new baby, the
infant saw the hands and the nails and started to cry. “Later
in life, I was fascinated, I used to sit and watch her,” Guest says.
“She always said, ‘I terrified you when you were little. You didn’t
like my red nails.’ It’s funny!”
The Duke & Duchess of Windsor
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were Guest’s godparents,
and the Duke enjoyed watching the young Cornelia ride.
She called him ‘Sir,’ while Wallis Simpson was ‘Duchess’. She
was scary for a little girl, Guest recalls. “She was very stern,
and he was very open and would talk to me. I don’t think she
really had a lot to say to little kids. But he loved ponies and
would watch me ride, so he showed a little interest. She, not
so much.”
The Duke passed away in 1972, and the Duchess lived until
1986, and Cornelia visited her at her home in Paris a few times
as a teen. “It was still very formal, but that’s so much that generation,
the formality of it, that we really don’t have so much
anymore.”
The Infirmary Ball
At the Infirmary Ball, an annual staple on the New York
City social circuit formally known as the Debutante Cotillion
and Christmas Ball, the girls are lined up in the Waldorf kitchen
and sent out one by one to curtsy, and then they sit down, in
formation, on the floor, holding candles. The debutantes are
required to wear white dresses.
When Cornelia Guest made her debut at this event in a
white dress by Carolina Herrera, her mother waylaid her just
as she was about to sit. “Pssst, come here,” C.Z. Guest whispered
to her daughter. “You’re not going to sit down on that
filthy floor in this dress.” “She grabbed me and we left for
Studio 54,” Guest says. The dress ended up getting filthy
anyway when she fell on the dance floor which was covered
in artificial snow while dancing with her pal R. Couri Hay.
When they brought the dress to Madame Paulette, the famous
Manhattan society dry cleaner, the proprietor took one look
at it and asked, “Where was Mademoiselle?”
Looking back at the debutante scene of the decadent 1980s,
Guest says it was fun. “We had a good time, and I never took
it seriously. I mean, I took it seriously because I had respect
for it, but it needed a little spicing up.”
She appreciates the social graces instilled in her growing
up in such a lofty atmosphere. “I love manners and I love discipline
and tradition.” “In life, you have to work hard. It’s like
acting, you’re always honing it, and I think that’s important.
You have to know the history of things; you have to know how
things came to be.”
As mother and daughter both indulged their rebellious
sides while embracing high society, today they share a love of
life’s simple things. “I always say, we’re country people. The
cities are great. We like to go out. We like to have fun, but we’re
happiest at home with our animals and our gardens and being
out in nature,” says Guest.
“I’m so happy in the mud, planting carrots, taking care of
my dogs, mucking out a stall. That’s what makes me happy,
that and being on a movie set. ” P
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